Auckland-based business software developer Enprise Solutions has received $2 million in investment from capital fund TMT Ventures. It will change its name to Enprise Holdings on the back of TMT merging its full shareholding in EMS Cortex into Enprise. The merged company is predicting sales of $50 million within the next five years.
Enprise Holdings will be 60% owned by TMT Ventures with the remaining shares held by Enprise founders Mark Loveys, Leanne Graham and Elliot Cooper, along with other Enprise staff. The newly merged company, which has 50 staff, is forecasting major new export sales.
The deal was brokered by strategic investment company Howard&Co, whose principal, Anthony Howard, becomes chairman of Enprise Holdings. Other directors are TMT Ventures fund manager Paul van Tol and Enprise managing director Mark Loveys.
EMS Cortex develops and sells a software and services platform that enables application hosting. Its foundation customer was Telecom, and the product is now used by hosting companies in the UK, US and the Netherlands. It is licensed on a fee-per-transaction basis.
Van Tol says the “go to market” part of the deal will be provided by Enprise, which has developed and successfully sold a job-costing module for the SAP Business One software package.
“Enprise is uniquely placed to put together hosting companies with SAP resellers who sell business solutions and manage implementation,” van Tol says.
“The EMS Cortex product will be used as the killer application to bring together hosting companies and SAP Business One resellers.”
Enprise will continue to go to market under its existing brand and EMS Cortex will become a product under the Enprise brand.
Managing director Mark Loveys says the company will accelerate its growth in each of three core lines of business. “We will continue to have a strong focus on our New Zealand SAP Business One and Exonet implementation and service business.
“We’ll accelerate our Business One development business aimed at the international market, and we’ll leverage our Business One skills and market contacts to establish a new line of business around EMS Cortex.
“In 2005 we saw that Business One did not have a job costing module, [so] we moved quickly to develop a product and, with SAP’s support, have been very successful in selling it to Business One resellers around the world. But in order to deliver value to customers, resellers need to sell Business One as a fully hosted solution.
“The model we’re aiming at is to set up an international channel of hosting partners. This, in effect, will give telcos an instant business plan with an immediate way to sell and implement hosting services.”
EMS Cortex is a breakthrough product in this context. With literally just a few keystrokes, an SAP reseller working with a telco can sign on a small to medium-sized business, providing Microsoft Office, accounting systems, Citrix — you name it. EMS Cortex provides a central interface and methodology to make this happen. What used to take a day now takes minutes.”
He says Enprise is based on the proposition that smaller companies want the same things as large companies in terms of the software they need, but they need it made easy, affordable and on a scale suitable to their size.
Enprise was founded in 2002. Loveys was the original developer of the Exonet ERP product, while Graham and Cooper were Exonet managers. Loveys was recently appointed to SAP’s Business One independent software vendor council.
TMT Ventures is a $100 million corporate venture capital programme that has Telecom as its cornerstone investor. Other investors include Alcatel, Lucent and Marconi. TMT is jointly managed by Direct Capital and US private equity investor Advent International.